Cross-modal symbolic processing can elicit either an N400 or an N2
-
1
UNSW Australia, School of Pscyhology, Australia
A new cross-modal symbolic paradigm was used to elicit electroencephalographic (EEG) activity related to semantic incongruence. 25 undergraduate students viewed pairings of visual lexical cues (e.g. ‘DOG’) with matched (50% of trials) or mismatched (50%) auditory non-lexical stimuli (animal vocalizations; e.g. sound of a dog woofing or a cat meowing). In one condition, many different pairs of matched/mismatched stimuli were shown, whereas in a second condition only two pairs of stimuli were used so as to reduce the need for semantic processing. A typical N400-like pattern of incongruence-related activity was evident in the condition using many stimuli, whereas the incongruence-related activity in the two-stimuli condition was confined to differential N2-like posterior activity. A supplementary analysis excluded stimulus characteristics as the source of this differential activity. The observation that a single individual performing a fixed task can demonstrate either a protracted N400-like pattern of activity or a more temporally focused N2-like pattern of activity in response to the same stimulus, raises important questions as to their origins and relatedness of these two components.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the Australian Research Council who supported this work with a Discovery project grant (DP140104394) awarded to the third, fourth and fifth authors, and an early career research fellowship awarded to the first author (DE150100667).
References
Keywords:
EEG,
N400,
N2,
Semantic Processing,
Language.
Conference:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Sydney, Australia, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2015.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Psychophysiology
Citation:
Griffiths
O,
Jack
BN,
Le Pelley
ME,
Luque
D and
Whitford
T
(2015). Cross-modal symbolic processing can elicit either an N400 or an N2.
Conference Abstract:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.219.00016
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
30 Sep 2015;
Published Online:
30 Nov 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Oren Griffiths, UNSW Australia, School of Pscyhology, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia, oren.griffiths@unsw.edu.au